Are short-term rentals taking over Bogotá?

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Are short-term rentals actually taking over Bogotá?

No. Short-term rentals have become a serious housing issue in a few parts of Bogotá, but they remain far too small to describe what is happening across the whole city.

The latest Inside Airbnb snapshot counts 19,187 Airbnb listings in Bogotá. Of those, 15,863 are classified as short-term rentals and 13,865 are entire homes rather than rooms inside somebody's home.

Bogotá, meanwhile, has just over three million households according to the latest housing estimates published by the city's housing observatory. Comparing those two orders of magnitude puts short-term Airbnb listings at around half of one percent of the city's households.

That rules out the broadest version of the takeover story. Bogotá is not turning its housing stock into tourist accommodation on a citywide scale.

The problem looks very different once we zoom into the neighborhoods where visitors actually stay. Chapinero alone contains 5,097 Airbnb listings, or 26.6% of the city's total. Recent research also finds much more extreme concentrations inside parts of Chapinero and the northern central corridor.

So the answer depends heavily on what we mean by Bogotá. Across the metropolis, Airbnb remains small. In a handful of neighborhoods, it has become part of the housing market itself.

Why does Bogotá feel so full of Airbnbs now?

Bogotá feels increasingly Airbnb-heavy because short-term rentals are packed into the parts of the city that tourists, expats and many higher-income residents spend the most time in.

Inside Airbnb currently finds more than one quarter of Bogotá's listings in Chapinero alone. Usaquén and Teusaquillo are the next major concentrations, while Santa Fe adds another cluster around the historic and central tourism zone.

That geography has been remarkably persistent. Bogotá's Instituto Distrital de Turismo was already mapping Airbnb activity before the pandemic and found strong concentrations around central tourist areas. More recent research still identifies Chapinero and the central-northern corridor as the core of the market.

A person moving regularly through Parque de la 93, Chicó, Zona T, Chapinero Alto, Quinta Camacho and the historic center therefore sees a very different Bogotá from someone living in Kennedy, Bosa or Ciudad Bolívar.

There is also a visibility effect inside buildings. Almost 69% of current Airbnb listings belong to hosts controlling more than one property. Residents are more likely to encounter repeated guest turnover, cleaners, lockboxes and professionally managed apartments than they would in a market made mostly of occasional home sharing.

The feeling that Airbnb has become unusually visible in Bogotá is real. It just describes a narrow slice of the city much better than Bogotá as a whole.

Is Bogotá's Airbnb market still growing?

Yes. Bogotá's short-term-rental market is still adding operators, and the latest data give us little reason to think the expansion has clearly peaked.

Inside Airbnb's host-history data show a long upward trend interrupted most visibly during the pandemic. More importantly, its highest recorded month for new host activation came very recently, when 242 new Bogotá hosts became active in a single month.

That is useful because listing totals alone can be sticky. Old or rarely used properties can remain visible on a platform long after the market has stopped expanding. New-host activation gives us another way to test whether people are still entering the business.

The answer is currently yes.

The longer trajectory points in the same direction. Bogotá's tourism authorities were already documenting Airbnb expansion before 2020. Inside Airbnb now counts 19,187 listings, while earlier datasets captured a considerably smaller market.

We should be careful with exact growth percentages because different Airbnb datasets use different collection dates and definitions. The broader pattern is much clearer: supply expanded through the late 2010s, suffered a pandemic interruption, recovered, and is still attracting new hosts today.

Is Airbnb spreading across Bogotá or mostly piling into the same neighborhoods?

Airbnb is spreading gradually, but Bogotá's short-term-rental boom is still overwhelmingly concentrated in a central and northern corridor.

Chapinero remains the obvious center, with 5,097 listings in the latest Inside Airbnb data. Usaquén and Teusaquillo follow. Earlier research from Bogotá's tourism observatory identified a similar pattern around established visitor areas.

A more recent study of Bogotá's residential market found that the post-pandemic recovery made supply even more concentrated around the center and Chapinero. Chicó Norte, Quinta Camacho and Chapinero stood out, while newer growth also appeared farther north and toward areas with easier access to El Dorado airport.

The geography is sticky. Tourist rentals keep returning to neighborhoods that already combine restaurants, nightlife, offices, walkability, visitor attractions and relatively expensive apartment stock.

Those advantages reinforce one another: tourists want those locations, hosts earn more there, property managers focus there, and investors then have another reason to consider short-term rental.

Bogotá's Airbnb map is broadening around the edges, but the core has barely changed.

Has Airbnb already taken over parts of Chapinero?

Yes. In some small parts of Chapinero, Airbnb has reached a scale where "takeover" is no longer an absurd description.

The strongest evidence comes from recent research on Bogotá's tourist-rental market. The authors found spatial areas around Chicó Norte, Quinta Camacho and Chapinero where Airbnb supply corresponded to more than 50% of the existing housing stock.

That figure needs careful interpretation. It does not mean half of every apartment in the whole neighborhood is permanently occupied by tourists. Airbnb datasets include properties with different levels of availability and activity, while the study works with specific geographic units rather than entire localidades.

Even with those caveats, the order of magnitude is striking.

We can cross-check the concentration another way. Chapinero contains roughly 90,000 households in recent local projections, while Inside Airbnb counts more than 5,000 listings there. A rough comparison puts advertised Airbnb inventory at several listings for every 100 households across the entire localidad. Because Airbnb activity is clustered within Chapinero rather than spread evenly, individual neighborhoods inevitably reach far higher levels.

As of now, Chapinero gives us the strongest evidence for the takeover thesis. The mistake would be extending what is happening there to eight million Bogotá residents.

Are Bogotá Airbnbs still mostly people renting spare bedrooms?

No. Bogotá Airbnb has moved well beyond the spare-bedroom model.

Inside Airbnb currently classifies 13,865 of Bogotá's 19,187 listings as entire homes. That is 72.3% of the market.

The distinction is important for housing. Someone renting out a spare room while continuing to live at home does not normally remove a residence from the conventional market. A whole apartment repeatedly offered to short-stay guests can compete directly with a long-term tenant.

We still cannot count every entire-home Airbnb as one apartment permanently lost to residents. Owners may use properties themselves for part of the year, advertise them only occasionally, or switch between short and long stays.

But the composition leaves little doubt about what Bogotá Airbnb has become. Whole properties dominate the platform, while only a minority of supply fits the original home-sharing idea.

Is Airbnb in Bogotá becoming a professional business?

Yes. Bogotá's Airbnb market is now dominated by hosts operating several listings, and some managers have reached a scale that looks much closer to hospitality than casual hosting.

Inside Airbnb counts 13,226 multi-listings, equivalent to 68.9% of all Bogotá listings. The largest host currently manages 166 properties.

A multi-listing host is not necessarily the owner of every apartment. Professional managers often operate properties for different investors, and a host with two apartments is obviously very different from one managing 100.

Still, the aggregate tells us plenty. Fewer than one third of listings sit outside the multi-listing category.

That professionalization also makes further expansion easier. An investor no longer needs to personally handle check-in, cleaning, guest messages, dynamic pricing and maintenance. Bogotá now has an ecosystem capable of doing that work on the owner's behalf.

This is one reason the market can keep expanding even after the pool of residents interested in casually hosting tourists is exhausted.

Are short-term rentals pushing up Bogotá rents?

Yes, especially where Airbnb is heavily concentrated. Recent Bogotá-specific research gives us much stronger evidence for a price effect than we had a few years ago.

A study examining tourist-rental platforms and Bogotá's residential market found that a 100% increase in annual Airbnb income was associated with roughly a 6% increase in residential rents and sale prices.

The estimated effect was much larger in the most Airbnb-heavy areas. The researchers found rent effects reaching roughly 26% in zones with particularly high concentrations of tourist accommodation.

Those numbers should not be read as "Airbnb made Bogotá rent 26% more expensive." The effect varies geographically, and the platform tends to enter attractive neighborhoods where prices were already under pressure.

Chapinero is the obvious example. The area was experiencing gentrification, redevelopment and rising land values long before Airbnb reached today's scale.

But the study still matters because it attempts to separate Airbnb activity from the other forces affecting housing prices. Its findings point in the same direction as the economic incentive we can see on the ground: when a well-located apartment earns substantially more from short stays, owners have a reason to move housing away from conventional tenants.

Across Bogotá, that effect gets diluted by the sheer size of the city. Around the most saturated neighborhoods, it becomes much harder to ignore.

Are Bogotá Airbnbs profitable enough to keep attracting landlords?

For the best-located apartments, probably yes. Across the whole city, the average Airbnb looks much less spectacular than the hype around short-term-rental investing suggests.

Inside Airbnb estimates an average nightly price of about COP 441,000, around 55 booked nights a year and annual revenue close to COP 15 million per listing.

Those averages combine extremely different properties. A luxury apartment near Parque de la 93, a small Chapinero studio and a rarely booked listing far from tourist demand all sit inside the same dataset.

They also describe revenue rather than profit. Cleaning, platform commissions, utilities, furnishing, repairs, management fees, taxes and vacancy can eat heavily into the headline amount.

Current market data around Chicó make the geographic difference obvious. Short-term-rental trackers still show relatively strong occupancy in well-positioned parts of Chicó, while individual properties can generate far more than the Bogotá-wide average.

That helps explain why Airbnb keeps concentrating instead of spreading uniformly. A landlord does not need short-term rental to beat long-term renting everywhere in Bogotá. The model only needs to work unusually well in a few thousand apartments where travelers are willing to pay for location.

Is Bogotá tourism still strong enough to feed more Airbnbs?

Yes. Visitor demand remains strong, and Bogotá's latest tourism numbers give short-term-rental operators a real customer base for further growth.

The city's Instituto Distrital de Turismo counted 14.65 million tourists in 2025, up 4.1% from the previous year and the highest level in its 2018–2025 series. Bogotá also received 1.91 million foreign visitors, 2.6% more than the year before.

That demand has continued into 2026. Bogotá recorded 751,969 foreign visitors in the first five months of the year.

International flying is another useful check. During the first eleven months of 2025, total flights into Bogotá were roughly flat, yet international air traffic grew 7.5%. That fits the wider shift toward more foreign visitors rather than a simple rebound in domestic travel.

The type of visitor also suits short-term apartments. According to Bogotá's tourism observatory, 56% of foreign visitors in 2025 came for leisure and tourism, while business travel added another source of demand. Bogotá attracts events, temporary work assignments, families and stays longer than a one-night airport stop.

Tourism therefore looks much more like fuel for additional Airbnb supply than a constraint on it right now.

How formal is Bogotá's short-term-rental market now?

Bogotá's short-term-rental sector is surprisingly formal on paper, although registration clearly does not solve the neighborhood housing problem.

Colombia requires tourist-accommodation providers to register through the Registro Nacional de Turismo, or RNT, to operate legally.

At the end of 2025, Bogotá had 8,650 registered tourist homes, representing almost 60% of the city's registered tourism-service providers. By April 2026, the number of active tourism providers across all categories had risen to 14,264, up 7.1% in a year.

Tourist homes contributed 689 of the 949 additional registrations recorded over that period. That's a pretty telling number: housing-based tourism is still one of the main sources of formal tourism-business growth in the city.

We cannot compare RNT registrations directly with Airbnb listings. One dataset counts registered providers, the other counts platform listings, and a provider can operate more than one unit.

Even so, tourist apartments are no longer a fringe category sitting outside Bogotá's tourism economy. They now make up its largest registered provider category.

Can any Bogotá apartment legally become an Airbnb?

No. An owner cannot legally turn every Bogotá apartment into tourist accommodation just by creating an Airbnb listing.

Tourist-accommodation operators need an active RNT registration. Apartments covered by Colombia's horizontal-property regime face another hurdle: the building's rules must allow tourist accommodation.

That building-level rule can completely change the economics of two otherwise similar properties. An apartment in one tower may be available for short stays while a neighboring building prohibits the activity.

Authorities have also shown that the rule is enforceable. Colombia's Superintendencia de Industria y Comercio reviewed 452 complaints involving tourist housing from 2024 and later brought proceedings against more than 40 operators. Alleged violations included operating without the required registration and falsely claiming that a building allowed tourist rentals.

The investigations were national rather than Bogotá-only, so we should not present those cases as evidence of a citywide enforcement wave.

They do show that horizontal-property restrictions have teeth. For Bogotá owners, the copropiedad can be as important as national tourism law.

Will current regulation stop Bogotá Airbnb from growing?

Probably not. Bogotá's current rules can block individual properties and punish non-compliant operators, but they do not place a hard ceiling on short-term-rental supply.

The existing system focuses on registration, consumer rules and whether each apartment building allows tourist accommodation. A compliant apartment in a building that permits short stays can still operate.

That is very different from a regime built around strict annual night limits, primary-residence requirements or a fixed number of tourist-rental licenses.

Colombia has debated broader reforms to tourism platforms and tourist housing, but recent proposals have not produced a sweeping restriction capable of shrinking Bogotá's Airbnb stock.

For now, the main constraint is fragmented: thousands of individual buildings can allow or reject tourist rentals through their own rules.

That will keep Airbnb out of many properties, especially residential buildings hostile to constant guest turnover. It is unlikely to stop expansion in buildings and neighborhoods already designed around investors and temporary accommodation.

Is Airbnb really a major cause of Bogotá's housing problem?

Airbnb is making housing pressure worse in specific neighborhoods, but it is nowhere close to being the main explanation for Bogotá's wider affordability problem.

The scale difference alone makes that clear. Bogotá has more than three million households. Inside Airbnb identifies roughly 15,900 short-term listings.

The city's housing costs are shaped by much larger forces: household income, mortgage rates, construction, land prices, population and household growth, regulations, transport access and the fact that a very large share of Bogotá residents already depend on the rental market.

Airbnb enters that picture as an extra source of demand for a limited type of property.

Its influence can become strong in Chapinero because investors, long-term tenants and visitors are effectively competing for some of the same apartments. The same mechanism matters far less in areas with little visitor demand and almost no short-term-rental concentration.

Recent Bogotá research supports that distinction. The measurable price effect rises sharply where Airbnb becomes dense.

So Airbnb deserves serious attention as a neighborhood housing issue. Making it the explanation for Bogotá's entire affordability problem would give a few thousand tourist apartments far more power than they actually have.

Could short-term rentals spread much further across Bogotá?

Yes, but the likeliest future is deeper saturation in attractive areas and expansion into adjacent pockets rather than Airbnbs spreading evenly across Bogotá.

The conditions for continued growth are still present. Tourist numbers are high, international traffic is growing, new hosts are entering, property management is professionalized, and whole-home listings already dominate Airbnb supply.

The market is also showing some movement beyond its traditional core. Recent research found strong growth in northern areas such as Ciudad Jardín Norte and in western zones closer to El Dorado airport.

Yet Bogotá's geography sets a natural limit. Most neighborhoods do not offer the visitor demand, nightlife, business access or tourist attractions that make Chicó or Chapinero work so well for short stays.

Building rules add another barrier, and greater Airbnb supply can eventually weaken its own economics by pushing nightly prices or occupancy down.

We should therefore expect more conversion around proven short-term-rental zones and a few new clusters rather than a blanket transformation of the city's housing stock.

So, are short-term rentals taking over Bogotá?

Partly. Short-term rentals are taking over small pockets of Bogotá, especially around Chapinero and Chicó, while remaining far too limited to describe Bogotá as a whole.

The citywide numbers are decisive. Inside Airbnb currently counts 15,863 short-term listings in a city with just over three million households. That is roughly half of one percent.

The neighborhood evidence points in a very different direction. Chapinero alone contains more than one quarter of Bogotá's Airbnb listings, and recent academic work found areas around Chicó Norte, Quinta Camacho and Chapinero where Airbnb supply exceeded 50% of the local housing stock in specific spatial units.

The structure of the market strengthens the concern. Entire homes make up 72.3% of Airbnb listings, while 68.9% sit with multi-listing hosts. Recent host activation has also remained strong rather than fading.

We now have evidence of housing effects too. Bogotá-specific research links greater Airbnb activity with higher rents and sale prices, with much larger effects in the most saturated areas.

The broadest version of the takeover claim is exaggerated. Most Bogotá residents still live in neighborhoods where short-term rentals represent a tiny part of the housing market.

But in parts of Chapinero, the argument has already moved beyond whether Airbnb is noticeable. Tourist accommodation has become large enough to compete seriously with residential housing for the same buildings and apartments.

The clearest answer today is that Bogotá has a localized Airbnb takeover problem. It is already intense in a few neighborhoods, still growing around the edges, and nowhere close to taking over the entire city.

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